Choose your business partner – CAREFULLY!

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One of the best pieces of business advice I ever got was “You can’t do a good deal with a bad partner.”Having had many partners over the years, I can say that this statement holds true. So I thought I’d offer some personal experiences I’ve had with partners both good and bad. Finding the Right Business Partner by Robert Kiyosaki.

A new line of business

We’ve been considering expanding our business to include ‘after school’ classes for students as a way to supplement our main program and stench defections to other schools that already provide ‘after school’ classes. We have lost a fair number of good students on this issues, students who were making great progress in their language development, but whose parents didn’t quite understand what we were doing, and how our student development programs differ from the more ‘traditional’ programs.

After school classes
In Taiwan, there are many schools that provide these kinds of services; in fact, the ‘industry’ hires thousands of workers to provide for tens of thousands of students. We already know that this is a viable business. And, if we wish to grow our main program further, it may be something that the market requires us to do. However, none of the partners have the skill set to provide this kind of teaching to students, and we’re already quite busy anyway. Inevitably, this means we are forced to choose between hiring an employee or finding a partner.

Finding a partner
We’ve already investigated the possibility of finding a partner, and we found a person who might be very suitable. Unfortunately, she didn’t have any cash to invest in the business. While investing your labor is, indeed, a well recognized form of investment in many countries, it had repercussions for the person concerned. So she brought in a friend of hers, a self-confessed business woman, who had BIG plans, much bigger than we could afford, much bigger than we imagined, and much bigger than we felt viable in our market area.

Therein lies the problem: in finding one partner, we’d have unwillingly gotten into bed with two partners, one of whom was an unknown entity to us; and one who would certainly have wanted a larger piece of the pie.

Cashflow, cash low and rosy predictions
But that wasn’t the only problem: it is likely that the addition of an extra staff member and partner combined with the additional cost of running a business on life support would have drained our primary business beyond what we could have reasonably handled. We’ve always been quite conservative in our predictions from day #1. In fact, when the school managed to pay a full rent on its first three months in business and pay nominal salaries, too, we were all QUITE surprised. We’d budgeted for six months of full rental payments and expenses, until the business started generating cashflow.

Cash, loans, cashflow: Going, going, gone…
 In Taiwan, over the years, I have seen so many businesses come and go. In fact there are several slots on the main street near where we live that regularly change business. In some examples, the businesses are gone in just two or three months. In one location near here, the first business started out as a baby or children’s clothes store, then it became a woman’s clothing store, then it was empty for a while. Now it is a hair salon.

In other places, I’ve seen supermarkets open and close in less than six months, bakeries come and go, etc.. Perhaps in some cases, the business owners have misunderstood the market. In many situations, though, insufficient provision for cashflow while business is building has been the principle problem. Combine this with overly rosy income projections for the first six months, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. In some cases, I suspect the initial capital was borrowed from friends, family, banks, etc., and once used, there was nothing to follow up!

It pays to be cautious…
So, choosing a partner who understands your business and your own situation, who accepts the risks of running such a business, and who has the financial wherewithall on their own account (without borrowing the cash) is crucially important.

Have you experience working with unsuitable partners? Or suitable partners? How did you find them? Did you deal with the problems?

TLA: my links sold out, plus 15% special deal for July!

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The interesting news on this blog is that I have finally sold the last of my five Text Link Ads on the right hand sidebar. This came as quite a surprise, given that my blog is only PR3, but the traffic is so much better than 3 months ago, that it really benefits advertisers!

So, I’d personally like to thank Patrick Gavin for allowing me this wonderful chance to earn some money! It really has helped me a lot.

Actually, Patrick Gavin is running a July special. It’s a good idea to take advantage of this. Here’s his email:

Hello Kenneth, I hope you are having a great summer. The inventory of niche websites have been growing fast I wanted to extend to you a special discount. Save 15% on all NEW orders for the rest of July! Just enter:

july

into the coupon code at checkout and you will save 15% off your order for the life of the order. Thanks again for your interest in Text Link Ads. We are excited about the growth of our inventory and the results reported back from our advertisers. If you are ready for an ad that can drive traffic and help your natural search engine rankings head on over to TLA now. Thanks again!

——————–
Patrick Gavin
President
http://www.Text-Link-Ads.com
——————–

So, if you’re interested in advertising with text links, this is one good deal!

Stuck for Ideas to Blog: Get resourceful or don’t hack it!

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I sat down to blog, and I looked in my publish queue to see if there was anything I wanted to work on. Unfortunately, the publish cupboard was bare. I didn’t know what to do because I like publishing on my blog, and I like to have a daily record of at least two published posts. Often I will do a backlog before I complete the current assignment, because I have gotten behind. I find that I tend to blog better when I have the ‘mood’. However, this ‘mood’ can be dangerous. And today, I needed it but it had gone on holiday.

Where was I going to find some ideas? Well, I started looking in the news at Google News for ideas, and I found something about Mars that had tweaked my interest. I was able to match that with a Mars panorama. Boom! A post was born.

Then I read through Google Reader’s feeds, but so many posts were talking numbers that I didn’t find it enticing at all today to talk about $, % or #. But still, you never know when your subscribed feeds may provide something really juicy.

Also, you can check out other types of media, such YouTube for ideas. Though many of the videos are quite silly, you can surely find something to get your blogging juices started!

Many people suggest checking the articles at sites like ArticleBase or ArticleCity for ideas. However, I have not found that helpful, as many of the articles just remind me of the things I don’t want to write about. But it’s worth a thought, if you’re really stuck.

The last way I can think of is just to start writing something. In fact, my blog is full of drafts that were begun this way. So sometimes I can begin something with a few words or more, and then save it for a time when I have a clearer idea of how to finish it. Other times I can open a post that has been begun in this way, and add or edit it as necessary so that it is fit for publication. This tactic separates the ideation and editing process and thus makes blogging successfully much easier.

There are many ways to find great ideas about how to blog, but I’ll just highlight five ways. How have you overcome blogger’s block? What techniques work for you?